Monthly Archives: August 2013

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Thing I hate about those bl!!ding Rockfax guides is they miss all the important stuff off. First, they should have directions to great bushes where you can get down and hide a really serious cr!p without going too far from the bloody route. The other week I was walking for ages trying to find somewhere. And basically what you want is to waddle off no further than it takes so you don’t smell it while you are climbing. But it doesn’t stop there, does it. In Team Crank we thought up this great name for them: Rock-F!cks! Not bad, eh?! Some other great suggestions: put little blobs on the route maps to show you where you put the eff!ing gear. That would save time so you could get more people through the route. Other suggestions: make a list of the best 7a wam-ups to look great on.

Rockfax could grey out the easy stuff and slap on a sign like this

Any more comments for them while we are at it? If those guys are reading, the Crankmeister is well up for having a parley about this and doing a joint thingy. ‘Crankmeister’s Rock-F!cks guide to seriously hard-sh!t climbing’. What about that? A rock guide with all the weedy-!ssed stuff under 7a cut out, maybe with those routes just greyed out on the topo, with a girl sign on them or something.

That isn’t 7 ways for them to get their act together, but believe me I’ve got far more than 7 up my sleeve.

Me and Team Crank – working name only – went down for a bit of the old slap and scrape (code for sandstone) last weekend. Some of that stuff is h!rd, even if it’s all bloody top-roping. [Some locals have the wierdest effing ideas about climbing ethics if you ask me]. Anyway, we were getting stuck on our 6a warmup (that’s English money, thickies, in case you are wondering) and one of our trusted gang who calls himself ‘The Prof’ got this wire brush out that he has and totally sorted this useless sloper, so that there was a lovely bit of something behind the back of it. Genius! We did a bit of soul-searching about it, and in the end decided to leave it at that. Except for gouging a couple of bits out further up where there are tricky feet. And another bit near the top where you feel like you are going to slip the f!ck off the route without a bit of a tickle for the left hand.

Give it a bit of this!

Anyway, no harm done is my feeling about it all. You can’t see it from the bottom. Wire brushing is cool too because they weigh less. Have you tried doing trad on lead with an effing hammer and chisel? It adds at least three goddamned grades if you ask me. No-one remembers that when they are on their high horse about chiselling, do they?!

Can you believe it, there is this bunch of dudes who have called themselves team f!cking sperm. They are obviously digging the CM as they are linking to me. I wish me and the other crag lads had a effing brill name like that. We’ve all got our own names, but we haven’t got a group name. Although you know me as the crankmeister, they don’t like that name as it sounds too foreign, so to them I’m the crank-master, which if you ask me doesn’t have the same cool ring to it. Anyway, there’s also first-clip-big-d!ck, after one of our lot who is actually a pretty sh!t climber but is always up for risking his neck on the first clip while we down a couple of cans of coke. He tends to bail out after that, understandably as sometimes those clips are higher than the f!cking Eiffel Tower. We used to take the piss about it, but in his defence he cites pace-makers in Atheletics, who do the first lap and jog off, knackered, to get a beer or whatever.

Sorry, got a bit lost there. I was talking about the lads’ nick names. There’s Little-Willy-W!nker; no-one has actually seen it, so we don’t know, but that’s why he gets the name. It’s not really a climbing name, but there you go. And there’s clipstick Cliff, who isn’t called Cliff. But one day he emailed on UKC for a climbing partner and this geezer who said he was called Cliff mailed back and Cliff (that’s our Cliff) wrote ‘f!ck off out of it you smart !ss c!ck s!cker’ presuming that Cliff was a false name just designed to take the Mickey. Anyway it wasn’t, Cliff was his real f!cking name. Can you believe it? Our Cliff was totally apologetic when he realised, but the guy got the hump and wouldn’t climb with him. The other bit of Clipstick Cliff’s name is rubbish really, as, to be honest, we are all at it now. Well, team sperm would have been the perfect name for us, but I guess that’s taken. Next time we are going at one of our 7a warmups we’ll have to sort out a proper cool sounding name. Team Crank would suit me. Or maybe Team The Crank. Any suggestions?

[Added later]This is an actual f!cking sperm unless google is tricking me. Amazing isn’t it. Surely can’t be as big as that though.

What I mean is, although you’d have two odd legs, you’d be with your latest mermaid reeled in from the v2s at the wall and she’d say ‘hang on, you’ve got two odd legs’, and you’d be like ‘yep, but believe me, there will be no abseiling off the end of this’. For the sake of argument, and, to be honest, to cut out the annoying fifty f!cking comments I’d have to moderate if I didn’t make this clear, I’m supposing you don’t already have Graham legs, in which case you’d still have two matching legs if you swapped one of his for one of yours.

Just on that, it isn’t the rich that bothers me. All power to them, I’d like some of that, with all the cool gear there is to spend it on. But it’s the arms. I don’t mind thinking about guys with no legs and massive arms. That’s fine. But the other way round? Nope, that’s not a thought I like to have popping into my mind at all. I mean, if God told you you had to have two of Dave Graham’s limbs, you’d definitely take your allotment in legs, wouldnt’ you. Having Sharma legs and Graham arms would be a disaster. You’d never be able to take your effing shirt off. But Sharma arms and Graham legs and you’d still get respect. Acually, maybe the Sharm would be even better if he had Graham legs: Has anyone discussed that? And: Hang On, That’s Not F!cking All. What I’m saying here misses that Dave might actually be seriously well hung. In which case if you really did have to take two of his limbs, you’d have a dilemma on your hands, because at some point you might be tempted to go for one of his legs and his you know wh!t, despite all the problems that would throw up.

‘The genou’ – Cranmeister’s term for using your knee when you can’t get your effing foot high enough, scored a goal with this Norwegian chick. Got me thinking about times I’ve ended up using my head too. Sometimes you get desparate to wedge yourself in and there isn’t anything else. I used to call those ‘Tets’, (Frenchies call their head la tete), but if you try calling it that people can’t help mishearing and think you are saying ‘tits’, which gets confusing, especially if after another few beers, you do want to say ‘tits’. I suppose the obvious thing to call them is ‘headers’, but then football has already bagged that, and I don’t like thinking about those rich guys with massive legs and no arms.

Don’t know about you, because you may not yet have graduated from the school-of-bad-man-climbing like I have, but do you ever find yourself pulling through a move so goddamned cool that you just want to get off belay, duck behind a bush and fire up the starter motor right there and then? Course, it would never actually happen like that. Not just because of the privacy question, unless you were one of those self-belay maniacs. But because by the time you’d got your thighs out of your harness, the engine would have cooled right down. Come to think of it, they should make a harness for this kind of market, with a velcro thingy that you could just whip off for those champagne moments. That would be something. And let me tell you, if there are any gear manufacturers out there getting a total tent pole on about the idea of a harness like that, I am well up for collaborating. There’d be some safety issues to deal with. Like the bad things that can happen between velcro and the hair down under. But there must be some Shoreditch design geezer who could sort that one. I ‘spose there is that bullsh!t about that stuff affecting performance. Remember the world cup where the wives weren’t allowed in? Personally I think that’s rubbish. Whenever I’ve had a bit of private time I always feel like I could flash 8a right there and then, though I haven’t actually tested it out yet.